Traditionally, elections for public office in the United States have been conducted with voting systems utilizing hand-marked paper ballots. In such systems, a paper ballot is typically issued to a verified voter by an election judge. The voter takes the ballot to a voting booth, where he manually marks his selections by placing marks or punch holes in marking spaces associated with the candidates he selects. The marked ballot is then taken by the voter to a ballot box where it is inserted and stored for subsequent hand or machine counting.
In recent years, the traditional system has been improved with the use of a ballot scanner to tally the hand-marked ballots as they are inserted into the ballot box. This has the advantage of making vote tallies immediately available at the close of polling, and, with scanners so-equipped, of preventing unintentional under-votes and over-votes. However, one drawback of the traditional system remains in that there is no provision for assisting voters who have a physical impairment, which would interfere with the manual marking of a ballot. Previous attempts at assisting such impaired voters have utilized electronic voting terminals wherein, instead of presenting candidate choices on a paper ballot, candidate choices are serially presented to the voter on large, easily viewable touch-screen displays. When the voter has made his selections, the results are tallied within the voting terminal, the total votes for each candidate being read from the terminal electronically or by means of a paper tape at the close of the polling place.
One drawback of electronic voting terminals is that there is no satisfactory means for auditing the voting process (i.e., confirming that each vote is tallied as voted, and that no votes are tallied which were not voted). Furthermore, there is no means for an individual voter to confirm for himself that his vote has actually been counted. Attempts at addressing these deficiencies have centered on the use of a paper tape or slip printed concurrently with each voter's voting. Such tapes and slips, which bear little or no resemblance to a ballot, have proven difficult to interpret by the voter and do not confirm that the vote has been actually tallied.
Another drawback of the use of electronic voting terminals is that they are inherently less efficient since voters require more time to electronically vote their ballot than is required to mark or punch a paper ballot providing the same candidate choices. Consequently, to avoid long lines at a polling place, a large number of electronic voting stations must be provided, if such stations are utilized as the sole means of voting. This imposes an undesirable cost and space burden on voting jurisdictions, since the electronic voting stations are expensive to own and maintain and require additional space in use and in storage.